The Lily of the Valley, Honoré de Balzac [the little red hen read aloud TXT] 📗

Dudley with the perfections of Madame de Mortsauf,
and done great harm to the countess by overwhelming her with the
experiences of your English love. Also you have failed in tact to
me, poor creature without other merit than that of pleasing you;
you have given me to understand that I cannot love as Henriette or
Arabella loved you. I acknowledge my imperfections; I know them;
but why so roughly make me feel them?

Shall I tell you whom I pity?--the fourth woman whom you love. She
will be forced to struggle against three others. Therefore, in
your interests as well as in hers, I must warn you against the
dangers of your tale. For myself, I renounce the laborious glory
of loving you,--it needs too many virtues, Catholic or Anglican,
and I have no fancy for rivalling phantoms. The virtues of the
virgin of Clochegourde would dishearten any woman, however sure of
herself she might be, and your intrepid English amazon discourages
even a wish for that sort of happiness. No matter what a poor
woman may do, she can never hope to give you the joys she will
aspire to give. Neither heart nor senses can triumph against these
memories of yours. I own that I have never been able to warm the
sunshine chilled for you by the death of your sainted Henriette. I
have felt you shuddering beside me.

My friend,--for you will always be my friend,--never make such
confidences again; they lay bare your disillusions; they
discourage love, and compel a woman to feel doubtful of herself.
Love, dear count, can only live on trustfulness. The woman who
before she says a word or mounts her horse, must ask herself
whether a celestial Henriette might not have spoken better,
whether a rider like Arabella was not more graceful, that woman
you may be very sure, will tremble in all her members. You
certainly have given me a desire to receive a few of those
intoxicating bouquets--but you say you will make no more. There
are many other things you dare no longer do; thoughts and
enjoyments you can never reawaken. No woman, and you ought to know
this, will be willing to elbow in your heart the phantom whom you
hold there.

You ask me to love you out of Christian charity. I could do much,
I candidly admit, for charity; in fact I could do all--except
love. You are sometimes wearisome and wearied; you call your
dulness melancholy. Very good,--so be it; but all the same it is
intolerable, and causes much cruel anxiety to one who loves you. I
have often found the grave of that saint between us. I have
searched my own heart, I know myself, and I own I do not wish to
die as she did. If you tired out Lady Dudley, who is a very
distinguished woman, I, who have not her passionate desires,
should, I fear, turn coldly against you even sooner than she did.
Come, let us suppress love between us, inasmuch as you can find
happiness only with the dead, and let us be merely friends--I wish
it.

Ah! my dear count, what a history you have told me! At your
entrance into life you found an adorable woman, a perfect
mistress, who thought of your future, made you a peer, loved you
to distraction, only asked that you would be faithful to her, and
you killed her! I know nothing more monstrous. Among all the
passionate and unfortunate young men who haunt the streets of
Paris, I doubt if there is one who would not stay virtuous ten
years to obtain one half of the favors you did not know how to
value! When a man is loved like that how can he ask more? Poor
woman! she suffered indeed; and after you have written a few
sentimental phrases you think you have balanced your account with
her coffin. Such, no doubt, is the end that awaits my tenderness
for you. Thank you, dear count, I will have no rival on either
side of the grave. When a man has such a crime upon his
conscience, at least he ought not to tell of it. I made you an
imprudent request; but I was true to my woman's part as a daughter
of Eve,--it was your part to estimate the effect of the answer.
You ought to have deceived me; later I should have thanked you. Is
it possible that you have never understood the special virtue of
lovers? Can you not feel how generous they are in swearing that
they have never loved before, and love at last for the first time?

No, your programme cannot be carried out. To attempt to be both
Madame de Mortsauf and Lady Dudley,--why, my dear friend, it would
be trying to unite fire and water within me! Is it possible that
you don't know women? Believe me, they are what they are, and they
have therefore the defects of their virtues. You met Lady Dudley
too early in life to appreciate her, and the harm you say of her
seems to me the revenge of your wounded vanity. You understood
Madame de Mortsauf too late; you punished one for not being the
other,--what would happen to me if I were neither the one nor the
other? I love you enough to have thought deeply about your future;
in fact, I really care for you a great deal. Your air of the
Knight of the Sad Countenance has always deeply interested me; I
believed in the constancy of melancholy men; but I little thought
that you had killed the loveliest and the most virtuous of women
at the opening of your life.

Well, I ask myself, what remains for you to do? I have thought it
over carefully. I think, my friend, that you will have to marry a
Mrs. Shandy, who will know nothing of love or of passion, and will
not trouble herself about Madame de Mortsauf or Lady Dudley; who
will be wholly indifferent to those moments of ennui which you
call melancholy, during which you are as lively as a rainy day,--a
wife who will be to you, in short, the excellent sister of charity
whom you are seeking. But as for loving, quivering at a word,
anticipating happiness, giving it, receiving it, experiencing all
the tempests of passion, cherishing the little weaknesses of a
beloved woman--my dear count, renounce it all! You have followed
the advice of your good angel about young women too closely; you
have avoided them so carefully that now you know nothing about
them. Madame de Mortsauf was right to place you high in life at
the start; otherwise all women would have been against you, and
you never would have risen in society.

It is too late now to begin your training over again; too late to
learn to tell us what we long to hear; to be superior to us at the
right moment, or to worship our pettiness when it pleases us to be
petty. We are not so silly as you think us. When we love we place
the man of our choice above all else. Whatever shakes our faith in
our supremacy shakes our love. In flattering us men flatter
themselves. If you intend to remain in society, to enjoy an
intercourse with women, you must carefully conceal from them all
that you have told me; they will not be willing to sow the flowers
of their love upon the rocks or lavish their caresses to soothe a
sickened spirit. Women will discover the barrenness of your heart
and you will be ever more and more unhappy. Few among them would
be frank enough to tell you what I have told you, or sufficiently
good-natured to leave you without rancor, offering their
friendship, like the woman who now subscribes herself

Your devoted friend,

Natalie de Manerville.

ADDENDUM

The following personages appear in other stories of the Human Comedy.

Birotteau, Abbe Francois
Cesar Birotteau
The Vicar of Tours

Blamont-Chauvry, Princesse de
The Thirteen
Madame Firmiani

Brandon, Lady Marie Augusta
The Member for Arcis
La Grenadiere

Chessel, Madame de
The Government Clerks

Dudley, Lord
The Thirteen
A Man of Business
Another Study of Woman
A Daughter of Eve

Dudley, Lady Arabella
The Ball at Sceaux
The Magic Skin
The Secrets of a Princess
A Daughter of Eve
Letters of Two Brides

Givry
Letters of Two Brides
Scenes from a Courtesan's Life

Lenoncourt, Duc de
Cesar Birotteau
Jealousies of a Country Town
The Gondreville Mystery
Beatrix

Lenoncourt-Givry, Duchesse de
Letters of Two Brides
Scenes from a Courtesan's Life

Listomere, Marquis de
A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
A Study of Woman

Listomere, Marquise de
Lost Illusions
A Distinguished Provincial at Paris
A Study of Woman
A Daughter of Eve

Louis XVIII., Louis-Stanislas-Xavier